On The Road With 'Macbeth' Is A First And Last Trip For Jeff Weiss

May 08, 1988|by GEOFF GEHMAN, The Morning Call

"A traveling penal colony," that's what Jeff Weiss calls the Glenda Jackson/Christopher Plummer "Macbeth" ported through July 3 on Broadway. The Allentown native and his fellow inmates have endured three directors, two sets, five Banquos, knee and groin injuries, runaway flu, snickering reviews. The play's curse has struck, and how.

Weiss is a rare inventor in a largely mushy, frigid production. His Porter is a toady, ambling standup comic. His assassin is a meek Sherwood Forest type, as skittish as his gatekeeper is absurdly rational. As a witch, he vibrates with childish glee over tongue- and fate-twisters. It's a treat to hear him knead the word "Graymalkin."

Offstage, Weiss has been pummeled like everyone else. Too many rehearsals, too many concepts, too much travel have blitzed the 48-year-old performer, playwright and director.

Normally a powerhouse of demonic electricity - nine hours of stage workdoesn't seem to dull him - he looked and sounded drained after a recent matinee at the Mark Hellinger Theater. Yet, for all his complaints and doubts, he finds a few pluses. He knows that he can turn disasters into raw material for his serial play, " . . . And That's How the Rent Gets Paid."

The Manhattanite can now be considered a charter Shakespearean. He made his Elizabethan debut in Liviu Ciulei's 1986 "Hamlet" at the New York Shakespeare Festival's Public Theatre in Manhattan. The production doubled as his coming-out party. For two decades, he had avoided, even abandoned, high- profile professional theater. An incomplete formal education stoked his neurosis/paralysis. Long rehearsals, textual analysis and tyrannical directors didn't appeal to him. He preferred the control and intimacy of Good Medicine & Co., the 10-seat East Village theater he operates with partner and mentor Carlos Ricardo Martinez. The well-endowed Shakespeare Festival was a far cry from a pass-the-hat outfit which once ran on flashlights and candles. What's more, Weiss had frequently roasted founder Joseph Papp in his five- to nine- hour works; to salt the wound, one evening he accidently deposited halvah on the impresario's white linen suit.

Papp remained an avid fan, booking Weiss to play three roles in "Hamlet." His bearded, bewigged Ghost thundered in a grave-uprooting voice; his Player King romanticized earnestly; his Osric prissed and fopped. These were fairly safe choices for someone who has adapted Pennsylvania Dutch actors, Swedish wrestlers, French cabaret singers, drag queens, babies, dogs, relatives, even a monk on fire.

Weiss played Theseus in Ciulei's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," staged during an arts festival in the summer of 1986. Outside his own arena, coming off the bench, he only hinted at his split-second reincarnations. TheAthenian ruler jumped, at a much more leisurely clip, between authoritarian orator, browbeaten husband and enthusiastic theater critic. Last winter he was surprisingly reserved as Menenius Agrippa in Ciulei's version of "Coriolanus," presented at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.. And yet he made the republican an unusually persuasive storyteller and frantic liaison.

A stay-at-homer, Weiss enjoyed appearing in theaters close to his apartment along East 10th Street. He rejected a "King Lear" in Georgia, a "Richard III" in California. So why did he choose to follow "Macbeth" as it lumbered through Stamford, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Boston and New Haven?

Over a Thai dinner in Manhattan, Weiss admitted he liked the contemporary novelty of a grand road show. In the 19th century, star/managers like Edwin Booth routinely toured Shakespeare around the country. Back then, schlepping a large company was far more affordable and simple than now. Back then, producers didn't have to duel with stage unions and entertainment options like television.

Weiss looked forward to joining Plummer and Jackson. Like Weiss, the former specializes in stentorian, commanding tones and cool, even chilling, bemusement. Like the latter, Weiss can be sexless, viperish, overbearing. All three are slices from a 19th-century ham.

The hefty weekly paycheck attracted him. After all, one cannot live solely on payments from the New York Shakespeare Festival, or revenues from the Performing Garage.

Weiss sings a different tune these days. He winces at the thought of the Stamford tryout, directed by Kenneth Frankel. A rubberized floor covering pulled groins and wrenched knees. (Plummer tore cartilage.) The original cave- like set oppressed. "Unless all of Scotland lived underground," he claims, "it wasn't Macbeth's castle." (A "cheddar cheese gorge" Jackson sniffed to The New York Times.)